July Newsletter

This month Growing Gardens has partnered up with OHSU’s Family Medicine to start a garden at the Richmond clinic site. The garden is small, but is growing crops that can be shared with many: tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuces, kale, carrots, beets, chard, and more. A dedicated group of the clinic’s patients and staff have taken on the shared responsibility of planting, maintaining, and harvesting the garden. But food is not the only goal of this garden: already the clinic’s Mindfulness Group has been using the garden for their mindfulness practice and folks in the neighborhood have already mentioned how much they love just going into the garden to look at all the growing plants. We can’t wait to see how else the clinic integrates the garden into healing!

We had a great first Chef in My Garden with Maya Lovelace from Mae. We still have tickets available for the remaining dinners but they sell out quickly. Don’t miss out this summer, get your tickets now.

With classes on community engagement, connecting garden-based activities to core curriculum, fundraising, and growing with the school calendar, our Youth Grow program trains you to do it all! Teachers, parent volunteers, nutrition staff and urban gardeners converged at Growing Garden’s School Garden Coordinator Certificate Training in June 26-30th. Together the 28 participants toured school gardens, learned hands-on garden activities for kids, discussed volunteer engagement, fundraising, pedagogy, garden-to-cafeteria guidelines and much more. The participants, hailing from across Oregon, Washington, California and Michigan, started developing “Master Plans” for their school gardens. Many thanks to over a dozen guest speakers from Portland’s vibrant school garden community for making this possible! If you are interested in joining us next year, add your name to this list to be contacted when the next training dates are set.